The Same or Worse? Juggling the Private and Professional Lives of Women Journalists during Pandemic Coverage

Abstract

Awareness of how journalists report critical events is crucial to acknowledge the media’s social consequences. Especially during emergent public health threats such as the covid-19 pandemic, whose impacts extend to professionals’ private lives. Yet, little is known about how journalists’ identities and personal traits influence their reports. This paper focuses on this dimension of newsmaking by inquiring about the interplay between gender and journalism practices during the covid-19 public health crisis. Resorting to semi-structured in-depth interviews with women journalists, it investigates through the lens of gender how the pandemic impacted work conditions and professionals’ lives. Results reveal what the first wave of the pandemic meant to women journalists, what happened when the lockdown officially began, and the consequences of working at home. They also disclose how women journalists handled the changes in their personal and professional lives during the outbreak, helping to acknowledge how gender shapes newsroom activities in exceptional times. Overall, they show, we contend, journalism as an institution that reproduces and creates gender relations.